...................................................................................................................................................................COMMENTS: * I'm surprised...that his speech is that advanced.* Forrest Gump: Stupid is as stupid does. It just takes 5 words to describe the donald* Ha, Trump, King of the simple speech and King of the simpletons !!* In other words, Trump appeals to low education voters. No surprise there.* The majority of Trump supporters are older, white men who do not have a college education. Keeping his speeches short and simple (and stupid) appeals to them.* I guess this pretty much underscores what most Americans already know: Trump's simple language basically indicates that he is a simpleton, supported by a few like-minded republicans.* I object to the implication that Trump is appealing to people who think like nine year olds. His audience are more like seventh graders.
...................................................................................................................................................................Good. Bad. Stupid. Outspoken Trump king of simple speech
By Leo Mouren, December 23, 2015

Good. Bad. Stupid. When it comes to his choice of words, Donald Trump keeps it simple.

So simple, in fact, that even a nine-year-old can get what the outspoken Republican White House hopeful is saying.

That's according to a test developed for the US Navy that assesses the complexity of an English text by looking at sentence length and counting syllables.

When this Flesch-Kincaid method is applied to the opening and closing statements made during the last Republican debate, the GOP frontrunner takes the cake for poorest vocabulary among the nine contenders who faced off in Las Vegas on December 15.

It reveals that a mere seven percent of the words used by Trump in a minute and a half had more than three syllables, meaning that even children as young as nine or 10 would have been able to understand him.

Trump caused astonishment this week by appearing to coin an obscene neologism -- "schlonged," derived from a Yiddish term for penis -- to disparage his Democrat rival Hillary Clinton.

But the billionaire businessman typically favors basic, brief words such as "good," "bad" and "great" for getting his point across on the campaign trail.

"If I'm elected president, we will win again. We will win a lot. And we're going to have a great, great country, greater than ever before," Trump promised at the end of the debate.

The tycoon sums up his foreign policy in equally simple terms, for instance describing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as a "bad guy, very bad guy."

- Elaborate speeches deceptive? -

"Donald Trump tries to reassure his audience by appealing to our elementary political instinct," said Peter Lawler, a political science professor at Berry College and author of a book on American political rhetoric.

"He uses simple, repetitive words," he told AFP.

"Some part of the population associates simplicity in rhetoric to honesty," added Matthew Baum, a communications professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government."They think that elaborate speeches are too deceptive."

The 69-year-old tycoon often employs the term "stupid" to describe his rivals and the current government.

"We are being run by stupid people. I used to say incompetent. But stupid is really, you know, is the next stage," he said earlier this month.

The real estate magnate's campaign trail bombast -- including extraordinary comments that stunned many observers -- appears to have done him no harm in the polls as he solidifies the frontrunner status he has maintained since late July.

A new national CNN/ORC poll of Republican and Republican-leaning registered voters has Trump leading with 39 percent support, more than twice that of his nearest competitor Senator Ted Cruz on 18 percent.

So how do Trump's Republican rivals measure up when it comes to their lexicon?The estimated age necessary for understanding the statements of other candidates at the last primary debate fluctuated between 11 years for senator Rand Paul and 15 years for fellow lawmaker Ted Cruz or retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson.

The share of words with more than three syllables in the statements of the other participants was 14 percent on average, double that for Trump.

Cruz used 24 percent of "complex" words, while former Florida governor Jeb Bush used 15 percent.

"The other candidates study a lot before the debates, and their answers seem scripted," Lawler said.

"Trump says whatever he has in mind. But in my opinion he does that on purpose, he knows what he is doing."

The leader of the Republican pack used such simplistic rhetoric during the debate to touch on the Islamic State group's use of the Internet.

"We should be able to penetrate the Internet and find out exactly where ISIS is and everything about ISIS," he said, using an alternate acronym for the extremists.

"And we can do that if we use our good people."Lawler said it didn't seem to matter to some potential voters that Trump lacks insight in some fields."There are some subjects where he has no knowledge at all, but people don't seem to care," he said.
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...................................................................................................................................................................COMMENTS: * The scandalous republicans have failed the American people and miltary fo nearly 7 years.* This analysis appears to be on target. The infighting among the various factions has led to no coherent actions by the republicans. Extremism and refusal to pick winnable goals has destroyed any hope the republicans have to take the White House. With Trump and probably Rubio as the republicans choice to run for president and Vice President, the republicans are the greater of two evils to choose.* The GOP is dying a slow death due to internal divisions and demographics. It's hard to see how they will ever win another national election.* It will be hard to put up with the whining and conspiracy theories the right wing will put out for 8 years after the November 2016 thrashing they will receive. However, it beats the country again invading and occupying other countries while bankrupting the country due to not expecting the armaments industry to pay any taxes. And of course, those who would profit from those wars would never allow their children to die in them.
...................................................................................................................................................................Remembering 2015: Republicans Get Conned
By Bob Burnett, December 31, 2015

It's hard to feel sorry for Republicans, given that they control both sides of Congress and two-thirds of state legislatures. It's difficult to feel compassion for members of a party who, for much of the year, acted like bullies. Nonetheless, in 2015 the GOP's rank-and-file get royally conned, not once but twice.

At the beginning of 2015, before Donald Trump entered the Republican presidential primary and sucked up most of the MSM energy, the political news was about the bad things that Congressional Republicans intended to do: defund Planned Parenthood - perhaps women's health services in general, cut back on entitlement programs, restrict the EPA's ability to regulate our air and water, and (just perhaps) kill Obamacare. Big words that came to nothing!

The far-out right Freedom Caucus flexed its muscle and shoved Speaker John Boehner out the door. Then it nixed his handpicked predecessor, Kevin McCarthy. Finally, as an anxious nation held its breath, the Freedom Caucus got their guy, Representative Paul Ryan.

To the surprise of many during the end-of-the-year-budget showdown, Speaker Ryan responded to his new challenge by surrendering to the Democrats. As Ryan Lizza reported in the New Yorker:

Recall that, only a few weeks ago, House conservatives were trying to use this omnibus bill to kill federal funding for Planned Parenthood, halt Obama's plan to resettle Syrian refugees in the United States, attack numerous Obama environmental policies, and generate a wish list of some hundred and fifty policy riders... [House Democratic Leader Nancy] Pelosi, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, and the White House got all of the riders struck from the bill... [in exchange for] an end to the forty-year ban on American crude-oil exports, which Democrats agreed to in return for an extension of solar- and wind-energy-industry tax credits. The extension of the tax credits is an enormous victory for Democrats, perhaps the most significant green-energy achievement of the Obama era. Bloomberg Business, citing one industry analyst, says, 'the deal will speed up the shift from fossil fuels more than the global climate deal struck this month in Paris and more than Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan that regulates coal plants.

Although, rank-and-file Republicans were outraged by Ryan's capitulation, they shouldn't have been. Congressional Republicans never had the votes to kill federal funding for Planned Parenthood and the other items on their kill list. It was a gigantic bluff. Republicans conned their base and, to a great extent, themselves.

We could laugh at Republicans and ask how they could possibly put their trust in weasels like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, but riff-raff wouldn't get the joke. The irony is that through all of 2015 the GOP faithful railed against President Obama, decried him as a socialist and "the worse president ever." Obama just had what probably was the best year of any second-term president in recent memory. Among other things, he protected his healthcare program, instituted strict regulations on coal-fired plants, signed a historic accord with Iran, and led the world at the Paris Climate talks resulting in a historic accord.What did Congressional Republicans accomplish? Very little. In the sad tradition of recent Republican-led Congresses, it was remarkably unproductive.

As a result of Paul Ryan's betrayal, GOP voters are justifiably pissed off at their Washington leaders. A November Pew Research Poll found that only 11 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they trust the government. "Far more Republicans (32%) than Democrats (12%) say they are angry with the government."

So it makes sense that Republicans are looking outside the Washington establishment for their 2016 presidential candidate. The latest Huffington Post Poll of Polls suggests their candidate will be Donald Trump. (Who has a commanding 37.5 percent to 18.3 percent lead over his nearest competitor Ted Cruz - another outsider even though he's a senator.)

This is the other con: rank-and-file Republicans feel Trump represents their interests -- but other than immigration, he doesn't. He's a single-issue candidate who lacks any substance on major issues. And, if you look at the historic conservative hot buttons, such as abortion, same-sex marriage, and taxes, Trump comes off as far more liberal than his erstwhile competitors. Trump is an uncontrollable narcissist whom Republicans like because he's a lot more compelling than the rest of their weak presidential field.

Now there's a third con, that somehow the competition will stay open and - gasp - result in a contested Republican convention in July. And some dark horse - Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan - will miraculously become the Republican nominee.

Not a chance! It's over! For weeks, Trump and his evil twin, Ted Cruz, have commanded more than 50 percent of the vote in each of the primary states. The Republican race is not competitive. The Loonies have won! The GOP is stuck with Trump and probably Cruz as his running mate.

It's tempting to feel sorry for the Republican base because they have been the big losers of 2015. It's tempting to feel sorry for them until we remember their objective is to destroy the planet and our democracy.
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...................................................................................................................................................................Teaming up, late in the gameCongress and the president are finally starting to work together, but will it continue in 2016?
By Susan Milligan, December 31, 2015

Capitol Hill Republicans and their voters didn't want him in office to begin with. They tried everything they could to thwart his agenda, both in the halls of Congress and in the courts. They fought mightily to deny him a second term and when that effort failed, they endeavored to undo what the president had managed to get done in spite of their opposition.

But with just a year left to go in the testy relationship between Congress and President Barack Obama, the two sides of Pennsylvania Avenue appear to have reached a late-game rapprochement. While presidents tend to get little or nothing done in their final months in office, Obama and congressional leaders are positioned to continue a late-2015 trend of passing legislation not just to keep the government functioning, but to address some societal issues important to both parties. While the presidential race – generally the dominant force in a campaign year – remains in a chaotic state, the narrative of a dysfunctional Congress and go-it-alone executive branch is poised for a surprise ending: somewhat grudging cooperation and a jump in productivity.

"Maybe we're starting to work together a little bit, eh? Well, that's what the American public sent us here to do," says Rep. Bob Brady, Democrat of Pennsylvania. And on the executive branch side, "I think there's some genuine optimism on the part of the White House, especially after getting the omnibus [spending package] through," says Donna Hoffman, a political science professor at the University of Northern Iowa, noting that both parties had to make concessions to get major fiscal legislation passed before the Christmas recess. "Maybe that's a hopeful sign. With new leadership in the House, the White House is more optimistic," she adds, but "whether they can work together in an election year is still an open question."

After a long spell of near-constant feuding, Congress and the administration got a slew of legislation signed into law after give-and-take by both parties, including:

* An omnibus $1.1 trillion spending bill that not only keeps the government running, but lifts a ban on oil exports from the United States. Democrats were unhappy about the oil provision, but signed onto the legislation after Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi – who had been negotiating with GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan – told her caucus that they had prevailed against efforts to cut domestic spending.* A tax extenders law that continues a series of tax policies – some the Republicans like and some the Democrats like. The $622 billion package includes business tax relief many Democrats said were no longer necessary to spur the economy. But 77 Democrats, including some of the chamber's most liberal members, voted for the package because it extends tax credits for the working poor and people caring for children.* A highway bill that provides $305 billion over the next five years to build and repair the nation's crumbling infrastructure. For years, it appeared all but impossible that Congress could approve a multi-year highway bill, but the measure passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in both chambers.* Reauthorization of the Export-Import bank. Republican conservatives had opposed the bank, which is meant to boost American exports by providing lines of credit to buyers who otherwise would not be able to get it, arguing that the entity undermines the rules of the marketplace. But with a rarely successful and stunning tactic, moderate Republicans signed onto a so-called "discharge petition" forcing their GOP leadership to put the measure before the House for a full vote. The measure ended up passing overwhelmingly, with a majority of GOP votes.* Education reform. Both parties had been complaining for years about the unintended consequences of No Child Left Behind, which was signed into law in 2002 and meant to hold schools, teachers and administrators accountable for the performance of students, who would be assessed with standardized tests. But partisan squabbling interfered with a common goal of tweaking the rules. After bipartisan negotiations, Congress remade the law, reducing some of the testing and giving more authority to state and local entities in evaluating schools. Obama, signing the new law in December, called it a "Christmas miracle."

The president, meanwhile, managed to rack up some victories of his own without Congress, and sometimes in the face of congressional opposition. His administration crafted a nuclear deal with Iran (which is still being criticized) and moved ahead with normalizing relations with Cuba. Advocates for the diplomatic thaw are hopeful the president will visit the communist island in his last year.

Meanwhile, the administration negotiated a sweeping, international climate change agreement in Paris, a boost to a president who tried and failed, when Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress in 2010, to pass an American law aimed at reducing global warming. The courts gave the president relief as well, upholding a critical part of the Affordable Care Act, while congressional Republicans tried and failed scores of times to undo the health legislation.

Obama has largely been a "captive of his political circumstances," hindered by a hostile Congress and two damaging midterm elections that gave him few allies on the Hill, says Bruce Miroff, a political science professor at University at Albany and author of the forthcoming book "Presidents on Political Ground: Leaders and What They Face." But in what Obama calls his "fourth quarter," the president has been freed to do some of the things he campaigned on eight years ago, Miroff says. "In some sense, with all the talk about liberal disillusionment [with Obama], he's finally become the liberal president people thought he was and were so excited about in 2008," Miroff says.

Democrats and Republicans alike give credit to the new speaker, Wisconsonite Ryan, who had to be dragged into the job but who has given rank-and-file members hope that the chamber will return to "regular order," doing appropriations bills separately (as they are supposed to be done), passing budgets on time and giving members more leeway in offering amendments.

"I think there was added momentum when Speaker [John] Boehner announced his resignation – that created some wind at our backs," says Rep. Gerry Connolly, Democrat of Virginia. Boehner was able to get some critical fiscal bills completed in his waning days in the job, setting a new routine for lawmakers used to back-to-back, stopgap spending bills, government shutdowns and floor debates that were all fight and no legislative progress. "I think that helped unlock some doors and windows" for Ryan, Connolly adds.

The success of the discharge petition on the Ex-Im Bank revealed the Freedom Caucus – a group of tea party-sympathetic lawmakers – for what they are, Connolly adds: influential, but not a majority view. "It doesn't mean they are without influence. It doesn't mean they can't be respected. But they are not this juggernaut they led people to believe," Connolly adds. "That was a critical moment. For the first time, Republicans broke with their own caucus and were willing to stare procedure and protocol in the face and say, 'I'm not going to be stopped by that.' It really liberated people," Connolly says.

In 2016, Obama is likely to push for a series of priorities he's been unable to accomplish thus far, including the closing of Guantanamo Bay prison (a 2008 campaign pledge) and gun safety rules (which he may do by executive order, Miroff notes). And while Congress may push back on some of those items, lawmakers are optimistic they can work with the president and with each other on other priorities. Sentencing and criminal justice reform has drawn support from both liberal Democrats and libertarian Republicans, and a pact is indeed possible, says Rep. Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma. A new Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) resolution is also something Congress will work on with the president, Cole says, as Washington grapples with how to battle the Islamic State group.

Ryan wants to do reform of entitlements, programs whose spending is determined by the number of people eligible to receive them (such as food stamps and Social Security), and while such sweeping and controversial legislation is tough to do in an election year, merely putting the idea on the table constitutes progress, says Rep. Dave Brat, Republican of Virginia. "The announcement [of a legislative package] alone would have a huge, immediate stimulus, if we maintain regular order and stay true to our promises," Brat says.

And the president enters his final year in office as an historic political survivor, someone who became the first African-American president, won re-election and managed to rack up a laundry list of policy successes despite operating in one of the most partisan environments in modern history. But the vestiges of his struggles remain. The Republican front-runner seeking to succeed Obama in office, after all, was among the first to question the president's American citizenship.
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Wednesday, December 30, 2015

...................................................................................................................................................................COMMENTS: * I'm grateful for Donald Trump. Not "to" him, mind you, but "for" him. Because I believe that Donald Trump is accomplishing -- far more than I've been able to do -- what I have been trying to accomplish for the past eleven years: helping Americans see the atrocious thing the Republican Party has become in our time. Perfectly said!!!* I've known how bad the teanut party's been for years. Hence why, unless there's also an independant third party candidate for a certain slot on the ballots, I vote Democrat.* about anything is better than what the GOP has going.* Note to my Republican friends [and I have many]: Donald Trump is your "love-child." And now he is your frustration. The alien birth of Donald Trump into the once Grand Republican family is the result of your years of "free love" indulgence with ignorance, intolerance and greed. If and when you become pregnant from this DNA of ignorance, you give birth to whatever life form you create. You created Donald Trump. Now you must live with and suckle your love-child as your own. Republicans [and my friends], you have no one but yourselves to blame for this unfortunate decline of a once Grand Old Party. Was this too harsh?* Trump is a "bum". He is destroying the Republican Party. IF he is the Republican cadidate in 2016 for the White House he is assuring that the Democrats will CONTROL the White House for the next decade. Trump is catering to the crude blue collar voter. The former minority voters, i.e., the females, African/Americans, Hispanics, Asians, a percentage of white males, etc. are TODAY the VOTING MAJORITY. All the Democrats have to do is obtain a LARGE turnout in November. Thanks to Donald!* Since the advent and increasing popularity of "talk radio" among the less informed and less educated Americans (I do not use those terms to denigrate, but to define), the Republican Party has only thinly veiled its racism and bigotry. Mr. Schmookler is correct in his assessment that the veil is being lifted thanks to Mr. Trump and to a lesser degree Mr. Cruz. The far-right's current willingness to hurt this country for political and monetary gain is unprecedented in my 64 year lifetime. Among the Tea Party base, the idea that Republicans met and decided to oppose whatever Mr. Obama tried to do (regardless of it's relative merits) would have never happened prior to the open bigotry that the right no longer hides and, in fact, is now applauded. My sincerest wish is that the progressives among us turn out the vote in record numbers to quench this vitriol that the right is spewing.
...................................................................................................................................................................Why I'm Grateful for (but Not to) Donald Trump
By Andy Schmookler, December 28, 2015

I'm grateful for Donald Trump. Not "to" him, mind you, but "for" him. Because I believe that Donald Trump is accomplishing -- far more than I've been able to do -- what I have been trying to accomplish for the past eleven years: helping Americans see the atrocious thing the Republican Party has become in our time.

Much has been said about the racism, bigotry, hatred, and fear-mongering that he is harnessing. Of course, all these are among the regrettable potentialities of human consciousness that have been systematically cultivated by the Republican Party, increasingly over the past generation, at least since the rise of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh. And as has also been much noted, what's remarkable about Trump, within that Party, is only how blatant and unsubtle he is about displaying the ugliness.

This past week, Trump displayed yet another aspect of human brokenness emblematic of the force that has taken over the right: the tendency to do the very opposite of what it claims to be doing.

The Republicans of our era, for example, claim to be conservative, while trampling on American norms and traditions and pushing for radical change. They claim to be patriotic while willingly injuring the nation whenever it is to their advantage. And they claim to be defenders of Christian values, even as the spirit that animates their conduct is the very opposite of the Sermon on the Mount.

And it is in that context, I suggest, that we should perceive Trump's already infamous comments about Hillary Clinton's debate-evening trip to the bathroom: "I know where she went," Trump said. "It's disgusting. I don't want to talk about it. No, it's too disgusting. Don't say it, it's disgusting."

He claims he doesn't want to talk about it, while makes the startling choice to talk about it. "I don't want to go there," he says, even while he makes himself the first presidential candidate in American history (I would wager) to "go there" and make all of us go there with him.

From some points of view, it seems a shame that a candidate like Donald Trump is taking up so much of the space in our public discourse. There are so many important issues we need to confront, from rising inequality in America to rising temperatures and rising seas in the world generally.

But from another point of view, it is good that there is so much focus on Trump --- in the media and now increasingly in the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders as well.

That's because on all those issues we as a nation need to deal with, it will be necessary to overcome the force that's taken over the right before the necessary progress can be made. And Donald Trump's ugly candidacy may prove to be the means by which power finally gets drained from that force.

There's a risk, admittedly, that Trump may become president -- I don't think it's likely, but given how surprising his rise in the Republican field has been, one cannot rule out the possibility of future surprises.

But I am willing to take that chance -- willing because Trump is giving the Republican Party a face whose ugliness is visible to so many more people than have been able to see through its more disguised forms.

Unfortunately, it is not as though Trump will help an American majority understand more fully the ugliness that has been there -- on more subtle display -- for years now. But that kind of understanding may be unnecessary for getting the public attitude toward the Republican Party to move in the direction it has so long and so desperately needed to move: to the extent that Donald Trump is seen as "the face of the Republican Party," his defects become automatically seen as those of the Party.

That just seems to be a big part of the way many people perceive the political world.

Trump' has already begun to be the face of the GOP by virtue of his persistent front-runner status. And if he becomes the nominee -- which I believe is more probable than the 27 percent the future's market now says -- the equation between Trump and the Republican Party would become solidified.

I'm glad, therefore, that Hillary and Bernie have stepped up their confrontations with Trump. In addition to the value of calling attention to the ugliness, their denunciations of Trump's offensive campaign rhetoric might make it more likely that the long-inflamed Republican base will choose him as their standard bearer.

And that, in turn, would likely lead this era's version of the Republican Party to the disaster it so richly deserves.
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...................................................................................................................................................................COMMENTS: * Please stop assuming atheists need to mythologize their convictions. Many of us have found the wonders of the universe amazing and awesome all on our own without a god's eye metaphor. * ... I'm not superstitious, myself, and your prayers have causes more wars and misery than any praceful atheist ever did. * ... And where did God come from. After all, if he exists he must be made of something. But what is this something and where did it come from? God obviously couldn't have created the very stuff of which he is made, but he supposedly created everything. So, if this substance has existed forever, why couldn't other substances, thus negating the need for a god altogether?* If you want to talk about an atheist's "God," the best you can do is try to fit them in with pantheists, and just call the universe itself, and everything it, "God." The stars and celestial bodies would hold no significance outside subjective beauty.* You can define "god" however, you want. I define him as nonexistent.* No. Non-theists would gladly accept ANY verifiable evidence as proof for god. We are VERY open minded. However, theists refuse to accept there simply is none. They are the ones with their minds closed to the truth.* And there's a flag on the play. "We have a proof by verbocity. Player illegally substituted vocabulary for logic."
...................................................................................................................................................................'GOD' for Atheists (and an Expanded, Scientific Definition of God for Everyone Else)
By Richard Greene, December 26, 2015

As many celebrate the Christmas season and the coming of a New Year, maybe there's a way we can, indeed, bring atheists and theists and the disparate factions and religions together on our little planet.

And, instead of focusing on the old definitions of "God", that many reject, or on how differently we see and honor "God" across the many religions, maybe there is even a way to use this once divisive term to bring us all together.

I think it may be with this image, right here.

This is The Helix Nebula. It is also called "The Eye of God".

As beautiful as it is, it is equally fascinating.

It is a vast expanse of gases from an exploded star, 700 light years away in the constellation Aquarius. And it is enormous! It's radius, the distance from the center to the outer boundary, is 2.87 light years which is more than 16 Trillion miles.

More importantly, though, "The Eye of God", like other nebulae, actually creates life. Yes, this, these massive aggregations of gases, create life... as well as stars and planets and virtually everything else in the physical Universe.

These nebulae are the nurseries of galaxies and solar systems and also contain the elements for plants and animals and humans to develop and thrive.

In other words, the atoms and molecules in our bones and heart and skin and brain... and everything around us... are created inside of these astronomical phenomena.

So, in a way of speaking, nebulae continue the work of what many regard as "The Almighty" in creating, and re-creating the Universe.

One way of thinking about this is that God created the physical universe 13.8 billion years ago with a flash of light called "The Big Bang." Since the stars that God created generally only live 10 million - 10 billion years, the entire universe as we know it would have gone dark and died about four billion years ago... except for this AMAZING universal recycling system.

And what an extraordinary recycling system it is!

As the biggest stars in the universe run out of their nuclear fuel they actually explode -- a sort of secondary (or tertiary, etc.) "Big Bang" and spew their guts billions of miles into the cosmos.

Over the next thousands and millions of years the elements from the insides of these exploded stars come together and form new elements and, eventually, form new stars and new planets.

So, God lives, and continues to create -- endlessly -- through nebulae. Here are some other spectacularly beautiful ones.

Crab Nebula

Orion Nebula

Ring Nebula

Twin Jet Nebula

Now that we are done with the science, how about utilizing these magnificent things that brought us together, literally and physically, to bring us together in other ways?

What if we added this scientific understanding to how we depict the "Creator"? What if we evolved and updated our definition of "GOD" by bowing to science (which if there is a "GOD", he, she or it would have most certainly also created) and depicting "GOD" in a way that we now know is related to the actual, proven physical creation of stars, planets our own bodies and the universe itself?

Some of our ancestors had similar thoughts. They understood that God was too big a concept to try to squeeze into one word and so they put in a dash or an underscore between the G and the D, or left the "O" out entirely. That partially or completely empty space would communicate the unfathomability, the ineffability, the infinite nature of the Almighty.

But then I focused on this extraordinary image of The Helix Nebula. In lieu of the "O" I thought there might be an even more artistic AND scientific way to communicate the vastness of God and the Universe, and this 20th and 21st Century understanding about his process of creation and re-creation.

So, starting this Christmas season and with this New Year, I suggest that we begin to write the word in a new way... with a magnificent nebula as an integral part, like the image above.

This image, this way of writing this extraordinarily important and complex three letter word, applies to all of us. Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Baha'is, all indigenous religions and every other religion on the planet. Every single one of us, no matter our religion or belief in or about God was created by a nebula. Every single atom in our body comes from one. Nebulae bring together the many hot, excited, diverse elements of exploded stars and cosmic dust. Perhaps its imagery can bring its seven billion diverse creations here on Earth together as well.

So, it feels accurate, not to mention beautiful, whether you believe in some sort of Supreme Being, or not, to honor these mini-"Creators" that we can now actually see by putting them front and center in a new, scientific depiction of the word we use to denote "The" Creator as we try, as Albert Einstein said in his extraordinary "My Credo" in 1932, "to attempt humbly to grasp with (our) minds a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is."

(A fuller exploration of Einstein and a possible scientific definition of "God" can be found in the just released eBook, E=MC2 and The New Definition of God http://www.TheNewDefinitionofGod.com)
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...................................................................................................................................................................COMMENTS: * They didn't. As soon as Obama took office, Mitch McConnell made the Republicans' intentions known...to make him a one term president. When that didn't happen, they just doubled down and blocked him on everything. Many's the time I wish we had a Westminster-model government...with the option of a vote-of-no-confidence.* American should be asking themselves: How, in a democracy, does a 13% approval Congress keep getting re-elected?* Can we get a cost tally for their partisan witch hunts....that produced nothing? * It doesn't matter .... These dooshbags will just keep spending taxpayer money on #$%$ that produces zero results. Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi!* Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale* Republicans protected the rich from the American middle class, spent millions on political witch hunts, waged wars on women and gays and held the American people hostage. Par for the course for the party of no ideas.
...................................................................................................................................................................When Republicans took over Senate, they promised to govern. How'd they do?

Last January, when Mitch McConnell took over as Senate majority leader, the GOP vowed no more government shutdowns, no defaulting on the national debt.

By Francine Kiefer, December 30, 2015

When Republicans took control of Congress at the start of this year, they promised to govern responsibly. No more government shutdowns. No defaulting on the national debt. They’d unstop the dam of dysfunction and get stuff done.

With the new year about to begin, the verdict is in: 2015 was one of the most productive years on Capitol Hill since divided government set in five years ago. The government also paid its bills and the lights stayed on, despite shutdown threats.

“The Republicans, particularly in the Senate, soared over a very low bar,” says Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank in Washington. Much credit goes to Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky for opening up the legislative process – and to Democrats for taking part as a cooperative minority, Mr. Grumet says.

Americans may not yet have noticed. In December, they gave Congress an abysmally low approval rating of 13 percent, according to Gallup. That’s perhaps understandable, given the near meltdown in the House when GOP hardliners drove Speaker John Boehner to a surprise resignation in October. Daily, presidential candidates tell Americans how terrible things are in Washington.

And yet, Congress did its basic job of keeping the government funded – passing a $1.1 trillion spending bill that takes the government through the end of September.

It also passed a $680 billion package that extended or made permanent tax breaks for individuals and businesses. Among other beneficiaries, it helps students, renewable energy, and low-income Americans and adds certainty to business. Grumet and many others complain that it also adds to the deficit.

Beyond that, lawmakers from both parties agreed on significant legislation. The first long-term highway and mass transit bill in a decade will finally allow states to get going on bigger projects that have been put off due to a lack of federal commitment.

Congress also reformed the much-maligned, and long-debated, No Child Left Behind law. Federal testing will continue, but states can set up their own accountability systems.

Other bipartisan measures that passed this year: restrictions on the government’s ability to collect bulk data on Americans’ phone use; a fix to a long-standing problem in Medicare reimbursements to doctors; increased defense spending at a time when the Islamic State is flexing its muscles; a measure to help the president get free-trade deals through Congress; and a bill to help victims of sex trafficking.

“By any objective standard, it’s been a year of significant accomplishment,” said Senator McConnell at his year-end press conference Dec. 18. Just a half hour before, Senate minority leader Harry Reid (D) of Nevada said much the same thing, calling it “a successful year.”

He added: “All the things that my friends boast about – my Republican friends – we could have done them years ago, but they obstructed them. We’ve cooperated.”

There would not have been the opportunity to cooperate, however, had McConnell not made the conscious decision to open up the legislative process. He allowed for much more input than in the past, for instance, through amendments from both sides.

About 200 amendments came to the Senate floor this year, compared with just 15 last year, when the Senate was under Senator Reid’s control. The process sometimes exposed McConnell to attack from his own party – for instance from presidential candidates Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida. But it also gave lawmakers a stake in the game.

Another difference was the Senate leader’s decision to push bill-making back to committees, rather than hatch them in the leader’s office, which had become more and more the practice. Returning to “regular order” not only empowers lawmakers but increases the chance that a bill will pass, because partisan differences can be worked out early on.

Both of those differences were central to getting education reform passed, said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R) of Tennessee, on the July day when 81 senators lined up behind the bill affecting 100,000 public schools, 3.5 million teachers, and 50 million students.

When McConnell promised amendments would be allowed on the bill, Senator Alexander was able to assure committee members that if they couldn’t leave their fingerprints on the bill in committee, they would have another opportunity on the Senate floor. That contributed to the bill passing unanimously out of committee – unheard of for such a contentious issue.

And leaving the shaping of the bill to the committee allowed Alexander and the ranking member, Sen. Patty Murray (D) of Washington, to come up with a bipartisan draft to put before members.

After amendments, “the second thing McConnell did was stay out of it” and let him run it with Senator Murray, Alexander said. “He put the committees in charge and that's how we got this result.”

At his press conference, McConnell was effusive in praise for Murray and other Democrats who played a key role in major legislation this year, calling their work "spectacular" and "unbelievably good."

The new House speaker, Rep. Paul Ryan (R) of Wisconsin, is also trying to get back to “regular order” and be more inclusive, particularly with his renegade right flank. The speaker has enjoyed a honeymoon of sorts with this approach.

“It is such an obvious and shocking insight that when you allow people to express themselves, they feel better about the process regardless of the outcome, than when you don’t allow them to express themselves,” says Grumet.

Both Republican leaders say they will continue to drive toward a more open, regular process, which next year will include an effort to pass spending bills individually, rather than have them all pile up at the end of the year. They also say they will look for common ground where it is to be found – perhaps on judicial reform.

But expect them to also draw sharp contrasts with Democrats. Next week, Republicans in Congress plan to send President Obama a budget reconciliation bill that repeals most of Obamacare and defunds Planned Parenthood. The president will veto it, but that’s the point of a messaging effort such as this.

Meanwhile, Speaker Ryan’s top priority is to come up with a GOP agenda as the nation heads into a presidential election. Exactly what that will look like – and whether he can unite his fractious caucus behind it – remains to be seen.
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...................................................................................................................................................................COMMENTS: * Let's get real. They do not rival the GOP, they bought the GOP.* Every bill promoted by republicans was written by Koch Industries.* The Koch brothers bought the GOP because it was for sale.* YES. Liberals have their own millionaires, doing similiar things as the Koch brothers. THEY ARE WRONG TOO. Stop deflecting. Lets stop pointing fingers and pass campaign finance reform. If you want to ban abortion, you are going to need campaign finance reform first. If you want to ban guns, you are going to need campaign finance reform first. If you want to help the middle class, you are going to need campaign finance reform first. If you want to fix our immigration system, you are going to need campaign finance reform first. It doesn't matter if you are conservative or liberal, or somewhere in between. The only way "we the people" can get things done is if we fix our campaign finance system, since "we the people" are no longer in charge of our own goverment. * Unlike the Koch's semi-secret political empire, liberals tend to operate in the sunshine of public disclosure. * Did you read anything I said? This is not about right/left. We need campaign finance reform to protect us from millionaires on both sides.
...................................................................................................................................................................How The Koch Network Rivals The GOP
By Kenneth P. Vogel, December 30, 2015

The political machine that Charles Koch launched a dozen years ago in a Chicago hotel conference room with 16 other rich conservatives has exploded in size and influence in the past few elections and now eclipses the official GOP in key areas.

Read more on Politico
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Tuesday, December 29, 2015

...................................................................................................................................................................COMMENTS: * Republican modes of 'leadership' are limited to 1) cynical, Machiavelian manipulativeness and malevolence (Nixon and Bush 41), and, 2) hands-off, unconcerned-with-details, simplistic detachment (Ford, Reagan, Bush 43). With the current field of 'Pug candidates, especially Trump, we are moving onto new ground: the overtly psychotic. The 'lunatic fringe' has become mainstream!

* I would like to know at which point in office Reagan was fighting Alzheimers. Was it day one? It is astounding to me that this boob not only beat Carter but was reelected and is lionized all over Washington, D.C. Says more about the American people than it does about Carter, as far as I'm concerned.Nixon was a hands-on president, to his downfall. Reagan and Bush II show the damage that is done when the opposite occurs, a president is just too dumb for the office and his advisors essentially run the show.

* As a dementia practitioner I can say that based on my professional experience and observations of 100s of patients he clearly was suffering from the beginning signs of Alzheimer's Disease and the progression of the disease process was accelerated by his gunshot trauma during the attempt on his life. Trauma, illness, and surgery - due to anesthesia, very often make symptoms more severe and cause swifter cognitive declines. It is often the first real sign of problem when a traumatic illness takes place.

* I remember the 1992 All Star game when he came into the booth and seemed totally befuddled (also calling Joe Buck by his father's name Jack). They certainly shuffled him out of there before the inning ended. I looked at my mother and she said, 'That man sits right next to the red button'.* Reagan, Quayle, Bush #2, Palin, Rick Perry, Greg Abbott. There's a pattern. People with money get behind these airheads and get them elected because they'll do whatever their corporate masters tell them to do. They're nothing but marionettes.* I met and talked with him when I was a California college student in the 1960's. He was an idiot, easily manipulated, prime rethuglicon presidential material. Controllable. And quite charming. Humans are so easily fooled.
...................................................................................................................................................................Behind the Ronald Reagan myth: “No one had ever entered the White House so grossly ill informed”

Reagan embarrassed himself in news conferences, Cabinet meetings. Recalling how GOP cringed at his lack of interest

By William Leuchtenburg, December 28, 2015

No one had ever entered the White House so grossly ill informed. At presidential news conferences, especially in his first year, Ronald Reagan embarrassed himself. On one occasion, asked why he advocated putting missiles in vulnerable places, he responded, his face registering bewilderment, “I don’t know but what maybe you haven’t gotten into the area that I’m going to turn over to the secretary of defense.” Frequently, he knew nothing about events that had been headlined in the morning newspaper. In 1984, when asked a question he should have fielded easily, Reagan looked befuddled, and his wife had to step in to rescue him. “Doing everything we can,” she whispered. “Doing everything we can,” the president echoed. To be sure, his detractors sometimes exaggerated his ignorance. The publication of his radio addresses of the 1950s revealed a considerable command of facts, though in a narrow range. But nothing suggested profundity. “You could walk through Ronald Reagan’s deepest thoughts,” a California legislator said, “and not get your ankles wet.”

In all fields of public affairs—from diplomacy to the economy—the president stunned Washington policymakers by how little basic information he commanded. His mind, said the well-disposed Peggy Noonan, was “barren terrain.” Speaking of one far-ranging discussion on the MX missile, the Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, an authority on national defense, reported, “Reagan’s only contribution throughout the entire hour and a half was to interrupt somewhere at midpoint to tell us he’d watched a movie the night before, and he gave us the plot from War Games.” The president “cut ribbons and made speeches. He did these things beautifully,” Congressman Jim Wright of Texas acknowledged. “But he never knew frijoles from pralines about the substantive facts of issues.” Some thought him to be not only ignorant but, in the word of a former CIA director, “stupid.” Clark Clifford called the president an “amiable dunce,” and the usually restrained columnist David Broder wrote, “The task of watering the arid desert between Reagan’s ears is a challenging one for his aides.”

No Democratic adversary would ever constitute as great a peril to the president’s political future, his advisers concluded, as Reagan did himself. Therefore, they protected him by severely restricting situations where he might blurt out a fantasy. His staff, one study reported, wrapped him “in excelsior,” while “keeping the press at shouting distance or beyond.” In his first year as president, he held only six news conferences—fewest ever in the modern era. Aides also prepared scores of cue cards, so that he would know how to greet visitors and respond to interviewers. His secretary of the treasury and later chief of staff said of the president: “Every moment of every public appearance was scheduled, every word scripted, every place where Reagan was expected to stand was chalked with toe marks.” Those manipulations, he added, seemed customary to Reagan, for “he had been learning his lines, composing his facial expressions, hitting his toe marks for half a century.” Each night, before turning in, he took comfort in a shooting schedule for the next day’s television- focused events that was laid out for him at his bedside, just as it had been in Hollywood.

His White House staff found it difficult, often impossible, to get him to stir himself to follow even this rudimentary routine. When he was expected to read briefing papers, he lazed on a couch watching old movies. On the day before a summit meeting with world leaders about the future of the economy, he was given a briefing book. The next morning, his chief of staff asked him why he had not even opened it. “Well, Jim,” the president explained, “The Sound of Music was on last night.”

“Reagan,” his principal biographer, Lou Cannon, has written, “may have been the one president in the history of the republic who saw his election as a chance to get some rest.” (He spent nearly a full year of his tenure not in the White House but at his Rancho del Cielo in the hills above Santa Barbara.) Cabinet officials had to accommodate themselves to Reagan’s slumbering during discussions of pressing issues, and on a multination European trip, he nodded off so often at meetings with heads of state, among them French president François Mitterand, that reporters, borrowing the title of a film noir, designated the journey “The Big Sleep.” He even dozed during a televised audience at the Vatican while the pope was speaking to him. A satirist lampooned Reagan by transmuting Dolly Parton’s “Workin’ 9 to 5” into “Workin’ 9 to 10,” and TV’s Johnny Carson quipped, “There are only two reasons you wake President Reagan: World War III and if Hellcats of the Navy is on the Late Show.” Reagan tossed off criticism of his napping on the job with drollery. He told the White House press corps, “I am concerned about what is happening in government—and it’s caused me many a sleepless afternoon,” and he jested that posterity would place a marker on his chair in the Cabinet Room: “Reagan Slept Here.”His team devised ingenious ways to get him to pay attention. Aware that he was obsessed with movies, his national security adviser had the CIA put together a film on world leaders the president was scheduled to encounter. His defense secretary stooped lower. He got Reagan to sign off on production of the MX missile by showing him a cartoon. Once again, the president made a joke of his lack of involvement: “It’s true that hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?” Cannon, who had observed him closely for years and with considerable admiration, took his lapses more seriously. “Seen either in military or economic terms,” he concluded, “the nation paid a high price for a president who skimped on preparation, avoided complexities and news conferences and depended far too heavily on anecdotes, charts, graphics and cartoons.”Subordinates also found Reagan to be an exasperatingly disengaged administrator. “Trying to forge policy,” said George Shultz, his longest- serving secretary of state, was “like walking through a swamp.” Donald Regan recalled: “In the four years that I served as secretary of the treasury, I never saw President Reagan alone and never discussed economic philosophy….I had to figure these things out like any other American, by studying his speeches and reading the newspapers. . . . After I accepted the job, he simply hung up and vanished.” One of his national security advisers, General Colin Powell, recalled that “the President’s passive management style placed a tremendous burden on us,” and another national security adviser, Frank Carlucci, observed: “The Great Communicator wasn’t always the greatest communicator in the private sessions; you didn’t always get clean and crisp decisions. You assumed a lot. . . . You had to.” Numbers of observers contended that Reagan conducted himself not as a ruler but as a ceremonial monarch. In the midst of heated exchanges, a diplomat noted, Reagan behaved like a “remote sort of king . . . just not there.” After taking in the president’s performance during a discussion of the budget in 1981, one of his top aides remarked that Reagan looked like “a king . . . who had assembled his subalterns to listen to what they had to say and to preside, sort of,” and another said, “He made decisions like an ancient king or a Turkish pasha, passively letting his subjects serve him, selecting only those morsels of public policy that were especially tasty. Rarely did he ask searching questions and demand to know why someone had or had not done something.” As a consequence, a Republican senator went so far as to say: “With Ronald Reagan, no one is there. The sad fact is that we don’t have a president.”

Instead of designating one person as his top aide, as Eisenhower had with Sherman Adams, Reagan set up a “troika”: James A. Baker III as chief of staff, Edwin Meese as counselor, and Michael Deaver as deputy chief of staff in charge of public relations—an arrangement that, for a time, left other appointees perplexed. The Reagan White House, said his first secretary of state, Alexander M. Haig Jr., was “as mysterious as a ghost ship; you heard the creak of the rigging and the groan of the timbers and sometimes even glimpsed the crew on deck. But which of the crew had the helm? Was it Meese, was it Baker, was it someone else? It was impossible to know for sure.” Similarly, Peggy Noonan ruminated: “Who’s in charge here? I could never understand where power was in that White House; it kept moving. I’d see men in suits huddled in a hall twenty paces from the Oval Office, and I’d think, there it is, that’s where they’re making the decisions. But the next day they were gone and the hall was empty.”

The first lady made her own contribution to the diffusion of authority. No one of his appointees, not even his chief of staff, exercised so much power. The New York Times, discussing Nancy Reagan, even wrote of an “Associate Presidency.” She understood her husband’s limitations and did all she could to make sure that he was well served. Their son Michael said, “Dad looks at half a glass of water and says: Look at this! It’s half full! Nancy is always trying to figure out: Who stole the other half from my husband?” She sometimes influenced Reagan’s policies, notably when she pushed for arms control, and she was thought to have been responsible for the removal of two cabinet officials and of the president’s latter-day chief of staff. During his tenure, she dismissed accounts of her impact, but in her memoir, she acknowledged: “For eight years I was sleeping with the president, and if that doesn’t give you special access, I don’t know what does.”Reagan’s staff found especially exasperating the need to clear the president’s schedule with a first lady who placed so much reliance upon a West Coast astrologer, Joan Quigley. That had been true since the beginning in Sacramento when Reagan was inaugurated as governor at midnight because, it was reported, that was the hour this woman set after perusing the zodiac. On a number of occasions, Deaver would spend days working out an intricate itinerary for the president’s travels down to the last detail only to be told that he had to scrap everything because the astrologer had determined that the stars were not properly aligned. Horoscopes fixed the day and hour of such major events as presidential debates and summit meetings with Soviet leaders. The president’s most important aide said, “We were paralyzed by this craziness.”

In these unpropitious circumstances, the troika managed much better than anticipated. Public administration theorists likened this three-headed makeshift to the mock definition of a camel: a horse put together by a committee. But Baker proved to be a highly effective chief of staff and Deaver a masterful maestro of staged events. Secretary Haig later remarked, “You couldn’t serve in this administration without knowing that Reagan was a cipher and that these men were running the government.” That judgment, however, failed to credit Reagan’s perspicacity. In setting up his team, he succeeded in taking to Washington two men who had served him faithfully in Sacramento—Meese and Deaver—while acknowledging that, since they and he had no experience inside the Beltway, he needed to salt his inner corps with a veteran of the Ford era. In choosing Baker, moreover, Reagan, stereotyped as a rigid ideologue, showed unexpected flexibility. Baker, a moderate, had been floor manager for Ford’s effort to deny Reagan the 1976 presidential nomination, and in 1980 he had run George Bush’s campaign against Governor Reagan.

From the start of his political career, commentators, especially liberals, had been underestimating Reagan. When he announced that he was planning to run for governor of California, he encountered ridicule. At a time when Robert Cummings was a prominent film star, the Hollywood mogul Jack Warner responded, “No, Bob Cummings for governor, Ronald Reagan as his best friend.” Yet Reagan easily defeated the former mayor of San Francisco to win the Republican nomination, then stunned Democrats by prevailing over the incumbent governor, Pat Brown, by nearly a million votes. Furthermore, he went on to gain reelection to a second term.

Reagan’s performance in Sacramento surprised both adversaries and followers. While continuing to proclaim his undying hostility to government intervention, he stepped up taxes on banks and corporations, increased benefits to welfare recipients, more than doubled funds for higher education, and safeguarded “wild and scenic rivers” from exploitation. A vocal advocate of “the right to life,” he nevertheless signed a bill in 1967 that resulted in a rise in legal abortions in the state from 518 in that year to nearly 100,000 in 1980. He was able to forge agreements with Democrats in the capital because he had the advantage, as a veteran of Screen Actors Guild battles, of being an experienced negotiator. (In later years, he said of his haggling with Mikhail Gorbachev: “It was easier than dealing with Jack Warner.”) His chief Democratic opponent in the legislature, who started out viewing Reagan with contempt, wound up concluding that he had been a pretty good governor, “better than Pat Brown, miles and planets and universes better than Jerry Brown”—the two most conspicuous Democratic leaders of the period.

Scrutiny of his record, however, also raised disquieting features. Months after he took office as governor, a reporter asked him about his priorities. Disconcerted, Reagan turned toward an assistant and said, “I could take some coaching from the sidelines, if anyone can recall my legislative program.” Expected to decide between conflicting views on the abortion issue, “Reagan,” Cannon noted, “behaved as if lost at sea.” His aides often found it difficult to get him to concentrate. On one occasion, in the midst of a vital discussion about the budget, he wandered off: “Do you know how hard it is to mispronounce ‘psychiatric’ once you know how to pronounce it right? I had to do it in Kings Row and at first I couldn’t do it.” He especially alarmed members of his staff by flying into a rage if the press reported that he had changed his position on an issue, even when he undoubtedly had. All of his disabilities—gross misperceptions and knowledge gaps—he carried into the White House. Yet he was to leave office regarded as a consequential president, and a number of scholars were even to write of an “Age of Reagan.”
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The big political story of 2015 was the rise of Donald Trump. In addition to generating endless cycles of entertainment and outrage, the Trump juggernaut crystallized a decade-long development: the fracturing of American conservatism.

The first hints of the crackup appeared in 2005, when the base rose up in opposition to President George W. Bush's proposed immigration reforms. It reappeared in 2009 with the tea party, but that movement was so quickly co-opted by the GOP that its significance was muddied. (Remember that in 2010 Sens. Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz were all tea party candidates.)

When the tea party fizzled, something far more populist – and far less conservative – took its place: the Trump faction. Trump supporters – and we should focus on his supporters, as Trump is not a politician but a grievance avatar– are at war with both the conservative movement and the Republican Party, trying to displace the first and overtake the second. The war they have launched against these political establishments is causing both to splinter, a disintegration that mirrors the breakup of the liberal establishment in the late 1960s.

From the 1930s through the 1960s, liberalism was the center of gravity in American politics, commanding so much institutional and electoral strength that both parties bent to its will. What ended that era of liberal consensus was not an assault from the right but from the left. Support for black civil rights fractured the Democratic coalition; the rise of student radicalism and Black Power shattered the liberal consensus.Presidential elections punctuated this unraveling, providing a series of quadrennial set-pieces charting liberalism's collapse. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson won in a historic landslide against conservative challenger Barry Goldwater, leaving the Republicans only the Deep South and Goldwater's home state of Arizona. Four years later, Johnson faced such serious opposition from peace candidates in his own party that he declined to run for re-election. And four years after that George McGovern, hero of the New Left, was routed by President Richard Nixon, picking up just 17 of 538 electoral votes.

Conservatives may not have caused the disintegration of liberalism, but they certainly benefited from it. Refashioning themselves as the voice of the silent majority, conservatives condemned '60s radicals for a long list of offenses. The New Left was crass and vulgar, lawless and antidemocratic. They were children of privilege who were committed to the idea that America was essentially bad.

Sound familiar? It should. Though they hold a very different set of beliefs about the world, Trump supporters (and the man they back) exhibit these same characteristics. Trump presents America as a washed-up also-ran. His closing statement at the most recent Republican debate included the lines: "Our country doesn't win anymore" and "Nothing works in our country." He swears a blue streak on the campaign trail and social media, and seems a bit cool on due process and constitutionalism. His supporters, privileged yet failing, are in search of a man on horseback.

Where conservatives in the late 1960s and 1970s appealed to a silent majority, Trump supporters sense they are in the minority, so their politics are edged with nihilism. (Hence their support for a candidate without any sort of coherent agenda.) Where construction workers in the 1970s hoisted signs reading "We support Nixon and Agnew" and "God Bless the Establishment," Trump supporters treat "the establishment" as the filthiest phrase in the English language. No longer believing the establishment is on their side, no longer believing victory is in reach, Trump supporters have committed themselves to '60s-style political radicalism.

In 1968, a group known as the Yippies (members of the Youth International Party) nominated a dark-horse candidate at the Democratic National Convention: Pigasus, a 150-pound Hampshire pig. As the Los Angeles Times reported, "The stated purpose of the Yippies is to make the Democratic convention looked ridiculous." It was a goal the Democrats were doing a fairly good job of achieving on their own, but the Yippies helped drive the point home. Perhaps this is the best way to understand the link between '60s radicalism, conservatism, and Trump. Donald Trump is the populist right's Pigasus, only one with a better shot at the nomination – and a better shot of hastening the coming conservative collapse.
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...................................................................................................................................................................COMMENTS: * Hmm...I find Trump's language and overall narcissism disgusting. The man has no class. He insults and tweets like a mean tween. Not very presidential. Not to mention he tells the most lies, according to fact checkers like politifact.com and factcheck.org. Not very appealing at all. I don't think he is stupid, but I think he is ignorant about the Middle East and all of its complexities. At least Obama understands the various fractions and factions of the different groups of people in that area. It's a very difficult thing to deal with, as we can see.* i dont need the media to tell me trump is full of shi&* The GOP really should toss Trump out of their party. The presidency is a serious job and they should finally put country above party. They should take on him and to paraphrase Welch to McCarthy, "You sir, have no decency." He goes beyond funny and now is simply ditsy.* What could possibly be more disgusting than this very small man's vitriol.* Whatever Hillary's bathroom visit was, I shutter to think how disgusting a Donald Trump bathroom visit is........ I can't even go there....* What utter nonsense! Trump followers are not real conservatives or religious. His followers are pot-bellied, beer guzzling, uneducated people - they are all disgusting.
...................................................................................................................................................................Trump played a clever trick when he called Clinton’s bathroom visit ‘disgusting’
By Zachary Goldfarb, December 22, 2015

On Monday night, Donald Trump made his latest polarizing comment, saying it was “too disgusting” to talk about Hillary Clinton’s use of the bathroom during the last Democratic debate and that she had got “schlonged” by Barack Obama when she lost to him in the 2008 Democratic primary.

Trump was surely talking off-the-cuff in his usual style — and the comments were criticized as offensive and sexist — but it was another example of his mastery in exploiting the psychological biases of conservatives who see much to dislike in today’s society and express support for Trump in the polls.

In fact, a growing mass of academic research has shown that conservatives have a particular revulsion to “disgusting” images. In this line of thinking, Trump’s decision to describe Clinton, one of the most disliked people by conservatives, as a “disgusting” figure would have been an especially powerful way to rile up his supporters.

The research — still debated — suggests that psychological and even biological traits divide people politically, both in the United States and abroad. These are attributes that may help explain why Trump has been so popular among a segment of the electorate, confounding political and media elites.

Some of the recent research has been most pronounced evaluating the differing responses of conservatives and liberals to “disgusting” or “negative” images. Several studies have shown that conservatives are far more likely to have strong reactions to these images or situations than moderates or liberals are. Researchers have also suggested that conservatives are more likely to respond negatively to threats or be prone to believe conspiracies, perhaps helping explain why Trump’s calls to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the United States or build a wall at the southern border have resonated with many voters.

In a 2008 study in the journal “Cognition and Emotion,” researchers at Cornell and Yale asked 181 adults from across the political spectrum about their views on a range of matters. Participants were asked to rate their agreement to statements like “I try to avoid letting any part of my body touch the toilet seat in a public restroom, even when it appears clean” and to indicate how disgusting they found situations like “You take a sip of soda and then realize that you picked up the wrong can, which a stranger had been drinking out of.”

Across most metrics — including partisan affiliation — there were no noticeable differences among demographic groups in their response to these statements and questions.

But this wasn’t true of all groups. Conservatives showed a statistically significant likelihood of reacting negatively to “disgusting” situations. (So did religious groups, but the researchers determined the finding about conservatives remained true even when controlling for religiousity.)

Another, more recent study showed that the response to disgust may be hard-wired into our brains — even when we don’t consciously perceive it.

In a paper published in 2014 in Current Biology, researchers at the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory and the Computational Psychiatry Unit at Virginia Tech showed 83 subjects “disgusting” pictures of dead animal bodies, dirty toilets, as well as pleasant images such as pretty landscapes and babies playing together. The participants took a standard test to evaluate their political leanings.

Consciously, liberal, moderate and conservative participants showed no significant differences in rating these pictures, although conservatives “had marginally higher disgust sensitivity than the liberal group.” But things changed when the subject had their brains scanned using fMRI machines as they saw the images.

With a more than 90 percent success rate, the researchers were able to predict whether the participants were conservative or liberals based on how regions of their brains lit up while viewing the images. And it turned out that conservatives had a much stronger reaction to disgusting images than liberals. Reactions to other types of images were not predicted by political views.

“Disgusting images … generate neural responses that are highly predictive of political orientation,” the authors write. “Remarkably, brain responses to a single disgusting stimulus were sufficient to make accurate predictions about an individual subject’s political ideology.”

Others have suggested that disgusting images can even alter people’s political leanings.

A 2012 paper by Cornell University researchers tested the response of students to the presence of a hand sanitizer. The researchers asked random students a series of questions about their backgrounds and political leanings in a university building, and then asked them either to step over to the empty side of the hallway or to “step over to the hand-santizer dispenser to complete the questionnaire.”

The study found that “participants who reported their political attitudes in the presence of the hand-sanitizer dispenser reported a less liberal political orientation … than did participants in the control condition.” The researchers then ran a second, similar study and found the same response.

“It is worth noting that the cleanliness reminder used in these studies was quite subtle — in one case, through simple exposure to a public hand-sanitizer station and in another case via a sign on the laboratory wall reminding experimenters to wash their hands,” the researchers write. “It is notable that simply reminding participants of physical cleanliness rather than involving them in direct physical cleansing was sufficient for the effect to emerge.”
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...................................................................................................................................................................COMMENTS: * Rubio is a phony career politician who will say anything to get his behind into the Whitehouse to live it up on us* How does the Washington insider claim outside status? Easy! Just don't go to work to do the work you were elected to do. How does that lack of work ethic qualify you for the Presidency, Marco? No is the vote from this Registered Republican.* A typical conservative lackey that hates government but sure wants the paycheck and benefits the job brings. Oh! And they don't want to actually work for the pay and benefits...* He will not work for the American people. If he couldn't care less about the people who put him in the Senate, what makes anyone think he would work for you in the Oval Office? Humm? Lets think about that? Big money donors are controlling this puppet. He's not mature enough to hold this position.* I had already decided I would never vote for Rubio because of his stance on amnesty for illegals. But, if that hadn't been the case, he would have lost my vote forever with his failing to even show up and attempt to vote against that outrageous budget bill.So long, Marco.* It is time to make it law that if you want to run for another office while still in your voted office you have to give it up to run.
...................................................................................................................................................................Marco Rubio Voting History: Here's a Look at His Senate Attendance
By Kathleen Wong, December 28, 2015

In the continuing GOP battle, Donald Trump's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski threw Florida Sen. Marco Rubio under the bus for missing December's government spending bill vote, according to BuzzFeed. Rubio publicly criticized the $1.1 trillion bill, but was one of two senators to miss the vote, NBC reported.

Rubio announced his candidacy in April. Since January 2011, he's missed 197 of 1,482 roll call votes, 13.3% overall, GovTrack.us found. That gives him the not-so-coveted title for the worst voting attendance for any senator for this year, CNN reported. His peak of absence is from October to December, where he missed 58.2% of votes, according to GovTrack.us.

"You've got a member of the U.S. Senate who is running for president who didn't even have the courtesy to show up and make a vote on the budget," Lewandowski said, according to BuzzFeed.

Rubio defended himself on CBS' Face the Nation, saying, "In essence, not voting for it is a vote against it," according to NBC. He previously said that his campaign keeps him too busy to hit the Senate floor, reminding everyone that he's not just on vacation, according to CNN.

In February, Rubio's office released a statement saying, "He is one of the only senators with young children who has not moved his family to D.C., and tries to spend as much time in Florida with them as possible."

People and the other GOP candidates have taken no mercy on pointing out Rubio's attendance record, ABC reported. "Marco, when you signed up for this, this was six-year term," fellow GOP candidate Jeb Bush said in the October Republican debate. "And you should be showing up to work."

Rubio's absence even has its own hashtag, #NoShowMarco, of those outraged by his voting record.

Phoning in sick worked for Ferris... https://vine.co/v/eYvwKmwhKWz

The most recent votes from Rubio occurred on Dec. 3, where he said no to the Public Safety and Second Amendment Rights Protection Act of 2015 and Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act of 2015, but said yes to Protecting Communities and Preserving the Second Amendment Act of 2015 and the Defend Our Capital Act of 2015, data from Vote Smart found.

Following Rubio's poor attendance record is Sen. Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton, GovTrack.us found. Previously running presidential candidates also had weak voting attendances, according to the Washington Post. John Kerry and even Barack Obama had poor attendance while running for president.
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